Chances are you’ve heard of a concept called “Game”, and if you are like most people you suspect this concept poses a dire threat to our most cherished values. These suspicions are correct; Game is fundamentally incompatible with our values and is eroding the very foundation of our society. Even the proponents of Game would agree that this is true!

Chivalry and the virtuous man.

Feminists may object to the concept of chivalry, but it is closely related to how we measure the virtue of a man. Moreover, without chivalry feminism would be ineffectual, as feminism is the belief that men are evil and naturally want to harm women, followed by pleas to men to solve all of women’s problems*.

But while chivalry is closely related to how we measure the virtue of a man, a man’s chivalry (in itself) is not what we use to determine a man’s virtue. In our society a man proves his virtue by his ability to seduce women. I don’t mean this merely in the sense of locker room boasting or the values of a small group of “pickup artists”. I mean this in a much more fundamental sense.

As a society we are obsessed with generating sexual attraction in women. We see this ability as the most pure test of goodness in a man. A woman’s feelings of sexual attraction are a mystical force, godlike for non-Christians, and God’s message for Christians. We can’t see how incredibly crass this is because we call it romantic love, but romantic love is far more intertwined with sexual desire than we are willing to admit**. To truly seduce a woman is to make her fall in love with you.

Generating the tingle (attraction) is an obsession with our society, and you can see it in our popular films. The Fifth Element is over the top in this regard on the secular side, as is Fireproof on the Christian side.

We believe that good things should happen to men who can generate the tingle. This is why we reserve our daughters’ most sexually attractive years as a reward for such men. Our greatest fear in doing this is that our daughters might become confused and bestow their gift of sex on the wrong (unsexy) men. Luckily there’s an app for that.

This is also why we need no fault divorce and child support. Yes it is important that we encourage men to settle down and become fathers, and yes it is important that children have the immense benefit of growing up with their fathers. These are good things, but when these objectives interfere with our core values, it is our core values that must prevail. What court in the land could overrule the woman’s holy vagina? If she no longer tingles for the father of her children, he deserves to be ejected from his children’s lives and have a more sexy man take his place. Think of the vitriol we heap on such men who dare to complain when this happens to them. They are the lowest of the low in our society, except perhaps for those most detestable men of all, the omegas who can’t attract a woman at all.

All of our sexual morality is directly anchored to the tingle. The #metoo movement doesn’t object to women trading sex to get ahead, it objects to the fact that in doing so such women are enticed into having sex with unsexy men!

What about virtue in women?

While the ability to generate sexual attraction is how we measure virtue in a man, we measure virtue in a woman by her ability to be strong and independent. Bad women are doormats with low self esteem who commit the cardinal sin of being untrue to themselves. Good women are strong and independent, and most of all, true to themselves. All of our moral messaging to young girls is designed to spur them to fight against the temptation to conform to someone else’s idea of what is good. In the UK the Girl Guide vow has changed over time from obeying God to be true to myself and develop my beliefs. And every girl in the west can sing along with the moral message from Disney’s Frozen. Elsa’s moment of triumph comes when she learns she must stop trying to be a good girl and instead be true to herself:

Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel,
don’t let them know
Well now they know

…

And the fears that once controlled me
Can’t get to me at all
It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me,
I’m free!

This is because we strongly believe that women deep down have a mystical gift for understanding what is truly good, which is why a woman falling in love with a man is the purest sign of his virtue.

Chivalry keeps our concepts of male and female virtue in harmony.

As I already noted, chivalry is what converts feminist demands into concrete action. But chivalry is also the way we reconcile the concepts of male and female virtue. Our unstated assumption is that being chivalrous is sexy. This is why Game is such a corrosive concept in our society. Game teaches that chivalry is an attraction killer, and that women are instead attracted to a host of traits that are neutral at best.

The problem we have is that young men now are able to see for themselves that Game works. This is true even though most men are not able to master Game in practice. The men who fail at seduction are able to observe the men who succeed, and it is painfully obvious that chivalry really is an attraction killer. All of this is made worse by the fact that not only are young men highly motivated to have sex, but our society is ordered around the sacred belief that being able to seduce women is the mark of virtue in a man. Even if a man rejects Game on the grounds that premarital sex is immoral, he still has to grapple with the fact that sexiness is the mark of male virtue in our society– and this includes the view of nearly all Christians. As Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. (President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) explains:

Put most bluntly, I believe that God means for a man to be civilized, directed, and stimulated toward marital faithfulness by the fact that his wife will freely give herself to him sexually only when he presents himself as worthy of her attention and desire.

The threat that Game poses is not that large groups of men will learn how to put it into effective practice (although many have and will). The threat comes from its assault on young men’s belief that chivalry is sexy and therefore chivalry is virtuous. Even worse, a young man doesn’t even have to ever hear the word “Game” or directly study its theories to be at risk of concluding that chivalry isn’t sexy. This is a message that is slowly making its way through the culture.

Game is so corrosive to our moral order because the normal methods to return to course only make the corrosion worse. Lectures on the importance of chivalry will be met with ridicule, since chivalry is unsexy. Lecturing men to be unsexy for the sake of virtue will likewise fail because our very definition of male virtue is sexiness.

It gets worse from here, because as Game dissolves the moral case for chivalry it is dissolving the foundation for sustaining feminism (in practice). This in turn jeopardizes the virtue of women by making it harder for women to be true to themselves. Without chivalry converting feminist theory into practice, millions of women will find it harder and harder to stop trying to be good girls and adopt a “No right, no wrong, no rules for me” attitude.

Game is destroying our most cherished values, our very concept of virtue! As a Christian all I can say is this destruction can’t happen quickly enough.

The interesting thing is that while a settlement has been reached, I don’t think we know anything more today about the much vaunted Theranos technology than we did in 2016 when I wrote Going through the motions.

However, while we still don’t really know the details behind the deception, this seems like a good time to revisit how Holmes came to become a famous billionaire in the first place. For some reason you won’t find much on this in the recent news stories. For example, CNN released an article today titled The rise and fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. But while the CNN article notes that she dropped out of Stanford to start the company in 2003, the timeline in the article doesn’t start until 2014.

Thankfully there are still stories around from 2014 and 2015 when the press was touting Holmes as the feminist heroine of the century. While there is still a huge gap between the founding of the company and 2014, the older articles do cover how she came to launch her own company at age 19. From the 2014 article The Dropout Who Became A CEO, And The Professor Who Became Her Employee we learn that Holmes attended Stanford after graduating high school. As she was just beginning her studies she imagined herself using what she was learning to change the world:

The inspiration to start a business came from Holmes taking Robertson’s freshman seminar on advanced drug-delivery devices. This, and a summer internship at the Genome Institute in Singapore, spawned her idea of a patch that would dispense a drug while monitoring a patient’s blood, as well as sending the results to the patient and doctor.

Dr. Channing Robertson was a professor and dean at Stanford. When he looked into the pretty young coed’s eyes he felt something very special:

I realized I could have just as well been looking into the eyes of a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates.

The summer before her sophomore year, she worked at the Genome Institute of Singapore, doing SARS testing with traditional methods, like nasal swabs. At Stanford, she’d been exploring lab-on-a-chip technology, which enables diverse results to be extracted from a minuscule amount of liquid on a microchip. By the time she returned to California in 2003, Holmes had developed a novel drug-delivery device–a wearable patch, or an ingestible, that could adjust dosage according to variables in the patient’s blood and update doctors wirelessly. She filed it for her first patent. “It was not only bold, but also remarkable in terms of its engineering and scientific integrity,” says Robertson.

The Inc piece says Holmes was only 19 when she hired Robertson as an adviser and hired a number of his students to develop… something. Exactly what Holmes dropped out of college to create is a mystery. The Inc piece speculates that the original intent was to invent what Holmes had ostensibly already invented, but somewhere along the way they decided it wasn’t feasible and switched to revolutionizing blood testing:

Theranos won’t share many details about those early days, but it seems to have been trying to build on the wearable-patch patent that had so impressed Robertson.

Robertson was just the first of many prominent older men who looked into Holmes’ eyes and felt something special, and this allowed Holmes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The money in turn allowed her to acquire office space and hire scientists, and kept her swimming in lab coats and black turtlenecks. But after over a decade of confidently dressing like Steve Jobs, her ability to create that special feeling was no longer enough. Ultimately it all fell apart.

Larry Kummer of Fabius Maximus has a new post up titled: The Lone Wanderers’ solutions to dating and marriage. The bulk of the post is a cleaned up version of our discussion of the topic on his previous post. I don’t think much (if anything) will be new to regular readers of this blog, but I think he has done an excellent job crafting our exchange into an accessible introduction into the issues we discuss in the Men’s Sphere.

Several readers objected to my recent post Harkening back to the golden age. As so often happens with Pastor Doug Wilson, the defense is not that what he wrote is correct, but that I’m being uncharitable for not assuming he meant something different than what he wrote. OKRickety wrote in defense of Wilson (emphasis mine):

To be clear, I will say that I am not of fan of Doug Wilson’s writing style. It is not easy to read and excessively lengthy, tending to obfuscate what he wishes to communicate.

I think Wilson’s perspective on the “times” is that today we have so-called “servant leadership”, whereas before (in what he unfortunately calls “normal times”) we only had feminist claims that normal masculine behavior often (always?) led to bluster, bullying, etc.

This is a standard defense of Wilson, and one that were I Wilson I would strongly object to. OKRickety is saying that Wilson, after blogging and writing dozens of books over a period of decades, is quite poor at his craft as a writer. Not only that, he is implying that Wilson’s stylistic claim to fame, of being a “hard hitting” Christian author (his theology bites back!), is untrue. If OKRickety is correct, instead of being a hard hitting author who tells it like it is, Wilson is in fact a producer of muddled bombast. This is a cruel defense, and with friends like these Wilson does not need enemies.

It is possible that OKRickety has the benefit of a close personal relationship with Wilson and knows from experience that Wilson gets it right when say discussing an issue at the local fishing hole, but disaster ensues whenever he puts his fingers to the keyboard. I think it is more likely that OKRickety is merely assuming he knows what Wilson means to write, so that no matter what Wilson writes, it must always mean what OKRickety assumes it means. Anyone who thinks otherwise must be biased.

Either way, as a result of my responding to what Wilson actually writes instead of what OKRickety knows Wilson meant, OKRickety says I’m being unfair, and guilty of poor reading comprehension:

I think the crux of our disagreement is that I think Doug Wilson’s post is indeed quite correct in regard to Christian masculine behavior, but your post makes great effort to throw shade on Wilson. I just don’t understand why you and others are so nitpicky about Wilson’s post, seemingly having a greater desire to find fault than recognizing the ample positive. Sure, I’d like for him to be perfect in his statements. I’d also like it for you and all of the commenters here, but I have not found that to be the case.

On top of that, it is my opinion that many claims of Wilson’s red-pill failure display poor reading comprehension or faulty presumptions about his motives. In other words, the claims are faulty.

In my opinion, Wilson is on the same side as you and most of your readers even if you don’t like his playbook or style of play.

I would suggest that instead of assuming Wilson is muddled in his writing, that OKRickety give Wilson the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is in fact writing what he wants to write. Moreover, if Wilson happens to be writing the opposite of what he intends, pointing out the logical flaws is doing Wilson a great service, as it offers him the opportunity to write a correction.

The decision to put a strong female at the helm of the show came in response to audience feedback.

“We were really ahead of the curve in that sense,” Zapcic said.

Feminism has always been about theater, so the fact that feminists are crowing about this latest landmark achievement for women shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Yet even the breathy NY Times article about this great feminist triumph was forced to acknowledge that the audience mostly didn’t care:

“If it can help empower women and we can be role models for these young women and men and show you need to respect women, then it is very fortuitous timing,” Ms. Lerner said. “It gives you the chills.”

…questions about the social significance of the new show were largely met with blank stares.

One Australian tourist allowed that it was a clever idea, but many audience members said they had no inkling — or didn’t care — that the show had changed.

This is something feminists should get used to. They’ve marked off all of their top and medium priorities on their “To Do” list. In the past feminists could give a woman a mannish haircut, put a leather jacket on her, and have a man fly her across the Atlantic and she would be celebrated as a great feminist hero, complete with ticker tape parade and solemn meeting with the President. Now all of the great play acting roles have been done before. The first woman to play the lead role in a local dinner show just isn’t exciting anymore.

Feminism used to be great theater. Sure it was make believe, but it was make believe on a grand scale. Now it is reduced to reminding paper-hat-wearing grown men and women not to forget to tip the wait staff.